Andrew Nikiforuk, in The Tyee, gives COVID a voice. It's a must-read piece. The virus offers ten lessons. I'll only deal with three of those lessons.
The first involves eternal growth:
Do you think your kind can just keep growing forever? Not even bacteria live such a fiction.
Maybe you should have listened to that German economist who said, “Man makes his own history but not always as he pleases.” Well, that’s me, a cultivator of displeasure.
Your overshoot is of another dangerous nature. Your future is no longer a reflection of your past, because you do not understand the dynamics of complexity in your own networked universe, let alone mine.
Since my last truly memorable visit in 1918 with my Spanish Flu (and it wasn’t Spanish, but no matter), you have made the world more connected and more complex with your machines and systems. You never bothered to calculate how steam ships could transform influenza from a regional delight to a global scourge, did you? Let me thank you again for that splendid innovation.
Every day you multiply this hazard. Every time you add another airplane route to a finite planet you accelerate the speed of my viral servants. All seems stable until your complexity brings down the house with a well-transported contagion on every doorstep.
Growth does not raise all boats. And the virus simply sinks many of them.
The second lesson is inequity:
Show me a pandemic that equally afflicted the rich and the poor? I know. I have not made one. Your kind underestimates my unprogressive nature, which holds but a mirror to the flaws of your social relations.
My coronavirus has struck down the usual victims: the poor; immigrants who must work of a living; people of colour burdened with disease because they have no access to health care. People incarcerated in buildings like cattle in feedlots. It never ceases to amaze me how you concentrate people and animals in the name of efficiency, heedless of the inevitable biological price to pay.
The reality is this. Pandemics like myself don’t create inequalities. We merely exploit them and play with the opportunities.
The third lesson is all about hubris:
Your vulnerability is a product of your hubris. Think of me, this fine pandemic, as a Mongolian cavalry probing the defenses of an overconfident Chinese city. Even after SARS and Ebola (you can’t say I didn’t provide a fair warning), I marveled at your porous defenses. All about my feet I found a global tableau of disbelief, denial and timidity.
Almost everywhere I ventured, I found the powerful unprepared and inattentive. I moved through open borders and took advantage of overextended supply chains. I found politicians who minimized me as another “flu.” Your leaders actually believed that they could muddle through an extreme event with impunity.
Everywhere I probed, I discovered familiar vulnerabilities. I found a stubborn resistance to act quickly and a denial of the exponential function. I found the precautionary principle abandoned like an orphan on the Silk Road. I found an expert class reluctant to don masks or to consider the dominance of aerosol transmission. I found democracies who stupidly elected to fight a viral fire in their hospitals instead of in their communities or at their borders.
In sum, I found inept bureaucracies incapable of managing catastrophic risk led by a callous political elite that prized money more than workers. What a marvelous and entirely predictable reception!
A few lessons to ponder over this holiday weekend.
Image: Failwise
12 comments:
Nikiforuk's writing on the pandemic is a must read, his perspective has highlighted brilliantly, all of the failures that have caused this entirely preventable scourge from lingering going on 1.5 years and who knows how much longer. Ontario's recent phased reopening plan is classic rinse and repeat as is British Columbia's circuit breaker, built entirely on hospital stats. With vaccination inevitably stalling before we get to the magic 70%, it ensure a potentially nasty, (lost count) next wave or endemic nature of what should have been a SARS 2003 quick appearance and exit. BC Waterboy
We supposedly learned something from SARS, waterboy. Obviously, we didn't.
.. simply brilliant creative journalism from Nikiforuk.. thanks !
The 3 points real resonate no matter where one is in Canada..
or the larger global perspective ..
One only has to live in Ontario to see it exactly as elegantly written
Thanks for flagging this good piece from Nikiforuk. Ontario's daily numbers are still nowhere near single digits - or even triple digits - yet Ford's stomping on the reopening gas.
I realize the risk of spread is very small outdoors, but the message being sent with this weekend's reopening of golf courses and so on flatly contradicts the stay-the-f**k-at-home order still in place. The danger isn't people playing golf, it's people from different households driving to the golf course, beach, park or playground together. How can you possibly police that?
Fourth wave here we come!
Cap
In Ontario, sal, the lessons are painfully apparent.
We live in a place that thrives because of tourism, Cap. Today, the streets are full and the visitors are descending.
This is, to my memory, Nikiforuk's finest essay. He captures the true but overlooked nature of the viruses and how we, but especially our governments, aid and abet these pandemics. After our repeated failures we still claim success and take a victory lap.
He captures what it means to be a planet of eight billion people crisscrossing the planet at high subsonic speeds on every imaginable route. Back when distance travel was limited to the speed of sail, viruses were harder to spread. In many cases the virus worked its way through the passengers and crew before they reached their destination. He notes that the precautionary principle has no purchase because it interferes with our notions of prosperity and commerce.
There's a telling piece at BBC about how humans are engineering the potential collapse of life on Earth through a devastating culture of materialism. Once again, rather than respecting nature and finding ways to live in harmony with it, we descend into something that resembles madness. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210520-could-humans-really-destroy-all-life-on-earth
It's no small thing that we have unwittingly yet quite willingly become the instrument of our own undoing. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
We have bought into the idea that our better and faster materialism represents progress, Mound. But that notion is the source of our undoing.
I had thought that perhaps mother nature was trying to tell us something with approaching 4 Million deaths to date from this scourge but when we consider that the number of births this year is estimated at nearly 54 Million perhaps we are not yet fully aware of the limits our worlds resources. The increase in world population this year taking into account deaths from other cause is just a mere 31 million or so …... I wonder what nature has in store for us next time around!
Mother Nature will always stage a comeback, Rural. We're fools if we ignore her.
@ mound.
There's a telling piece at BBC about how humans are engineering the potential collapse of life
on Earth
Come come now Mound do you not think that the memory of Princess Dianna's controversial interview with the BBC is not more newsworthy??
Ever heard of distraction?
Even the BBC succumbs to the depravities of FOX news.
Fake news ; you betcha!
TB
When we're mesmerized by celebrity, TB, we miss the boat.
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